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Breeds of Anand

The town where village milk producers organised in 1946 and began the cooperative movement that changed Indian dairying.

Anand

Breeds of this place

KankrejGyr cattleHolstein FriesianJersey cattle

Best time: November to February; National Milk Day falls on 26 November.

Anand is a town in the Kheda district of central Gujarat, between Ahmedabad and Vadodara. In 1946 milk producers here, unhappy with the prices paid by a private dairy, formed their own cooperative union. From that start grew a model of village milk societies, district unions and state federations that spread across India and helped make the country the world's largest milk producer.

Amul Plant at Anand featuring the High capacity Milk Silos
Photo: Notnarayan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Anand pattern

In the Anand pattern, each village has a milk society where farmers bring milk twice a day to be tested for fat and paid by quality. The societies own the district union, which processes and sells the milk under a shared brand, Amul. Verghese Kurien, an engineer who arrived in 1949, led the union for decades and became the face of the movement. The idea was simple: let the producers own the dairy.

Operation Flood

The National Dairy Development Board was set up in Anand in 1965 to take the model across the country. Its programme, Operation Flood, ran from 1970 to 1996 and linked village cooperatives to city markets, a change often called the White Revolution. Much of the milk in Gujarat comes from buffaloes as well as cows, and both desi breeds such as Gir and Kankrej and crossbred cows are kept by members. Kurien's birthday, 26 November, is marked as National Milk Day.

A trail idea for Anand

  1. The dairy plant The cooperative union's plant, where visits explain the milk's journey.
  2. National Dairy Development Board The campus that took the Anand pattern across India.
  3. A village milk society Watch the evening milk collection and fat testing.
  4. Institute of Rural Management The school set up in Anand to train cooperative managers.
About this page

Written by the EveryCow desk with AI assistance. Background: "Anand, Gujarat" on Wikipedia. Fair dates, markets and visiting rules change; check locally before travelling, and keep a respectful distance from working animals. If something is wrong, tell us.

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